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Monday, July 25, 2016

Paul Krugman, "Delusions of Chaos": Crime and Abortion

In in his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Delusions of Chaos," Paul Krugman refutes Donald Trump's RNC claim that crime is running rampant throughout the US, although Krugman cannot provide the reason for this improvement. Paul writes:

"[A] funny thing happened: Crime plunged instead of continuing to rise. Other indicators also improved dramatically — for example, the teen birthrate has fallen 60 percent since 1991. Instead of societal collapse, we’ve seen what amounts to a mass outbreak of societal health. The truth is that we don’t know exactly why. Hypotheses range from the changing age distribution of the population to reduced lead poisoning; but in any case, the predicted apocalypse notably failed to arrive."

Well, allow me to help Paul regarding the decline in crime rates. As observed by John Donohue and Steven Levitt in the abstract of a National Bureau of Economic Research article entitled "Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime":

"We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization. The 5 states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime. "

Given this reduction in crime, Krugman would have us know of Trump supporters:

"America isn’t the country they remember from their youth, and in this case they’re right — it has gotten much better."

Much better, as evidenced by the nominations of Donald and Hillary? I don't think so.

And then there's America's national debt which has reached almost $20 trillion, or $162,000 per taxpayer. In fact, an economic apocalypse is well on its way.

5 comments:

Krugman's DNC assignment today is to keep abortion rights as GOTV issue for the 'single-woman voter bloc' and to discredit Heather McDonald on crime stats (the national debt is NOT an issue to spin for today's news):

"... The Washington Post and Vox.com rushed out fact checkers to recycle many of the failed arguments against what I have called the “Ferguson effect”—the crime increase resulting from cops pulling back from proactive policing. Yes, crime is up, these journalists say, but it’s not as bad as it was years ago. “Even if the nationwide murder rate increased by 17 percent in 2015, that rate would remain far, far below the peaks of the 1960s and '70s and below any period in the '90’s,” argues Vox.

But a crime decrease that took two decades to achieve is not going to be reversed completely in two years. If present trends continue, however, we could see that unprecedented and unpredicted crime decline of 50 percent disappear in a few more years.

Vox compares the 1980 murder rate with the much lower 2014 murder rate. But the Ferguson effect kicked in only after the death of Michael Brown in August 2014. The second half of 2014 reversed the crime decline of the year’s first half, but the full Ferguson effect showed up in 2015 and continued at least into the first quarter of 2016, with homicides up 9 percent and non-fatal shootings up 21 percent. ..."

http://www.city-journal.org/html/trump-right-about-crime-14659.html

As for Krugman's observation? "America isn’t the country they remember from their youth, ..."

Everyone I speak with now that I have escaped the "progressivespeechpolice" by physically moving agrees that America was a better place when we watched "Lassie" on tv in the late 1950's. Every episode had three points: 1) Always tell the truth, 2) always try to be helpful, and 3) let Lassie save the day. and that what we miss most lately is the truth (and, more, better, JOBS).

The DNC email leak media coverage is also biased. So far, only The Daily Caller posted the email spreadsheet list of DNC/HRC donors expecting Federal appointments.

"When I visited it in early June, Hillary Clinton’s campaign website featured about 30 issue-specific pages focused not on a nation with problems to be solved but on discrete victim groups with wounds to be salved. The site illustrates the Left’s descent into crass identity politics. The federal government is the heaviest of policy equipment, best used sparingly for big jobs; but for Democrats, it has become a courtesy car, always on call to drive chosen constituencies from one point to another. Put me behind the wheel, Clinton seems to promise, and I’ll put you on my route.

Based on an examination of Clinton’s website, “racial justice” is her campaign’s organizing principle. Not only is her racial-justice page the most expansive on the site—longer by half than the entry for the economy—but it also links to nine other sections, including those devoted to criminal-justice reform, LGBT equality, higher education, climate change, and energy. (“African Americans hold only 1.1 percent of energy jobs and receive only 0.01 percent of energy sector profits,” in case you were wondering.)

Wherever racial linkages weaken, gender stands ready to pick up the slack. The section devoted to “women’s rights and opportunities” equals in length those for national security and the economy. ..."

http://thefederalist.com/blog/also provides insight into the actual issues, another daily antidote to the DNC "talkingpointsnews" that enslaves the NYT, WaPo, CNN, etcetera.

Today's examples:

http://thefederalist.com/2016/07/25/tolerance-was-a-lie-the-left-used-to-get-power/"...After Pat Smith, the mother of one of the men killed in the Benghazi attack, spoke at the Republican National Convention, GQ writer Bethlehem Shoals tweeted, “I don’t care how many children Pat Smith lost I would like to beat her to death.” After being called out for inciting violence against a grieving mother, Shoals has since deleted and apologized for the tweet. ..."

http://thefederalist.com/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-culture-war/"Trump’s critique of our economy is its own culture war. Trump frames the economy in culture-war terms. ..."

"...Wikileaks revealed, within the 74 emails where Sargent’s name in mentioned in Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails, that the substance of Sargent’s “opinionated” columns comes not from his keen analysis of political events, nor is it rooted solely in his liberal, political philosophy. Instead, his particular slant leans heavily on DNC input where support for the Clinton candidacy is, and has been from the start of this election cycle, firmly established.

In short, Sargent is a DNC-Clinton shill on the payroll of the Washington Post.

In addition to coordinating his blog columns with DNC communicators, Sargent is a conduit for DNC talking points that travel through him to rank-and-file Washington Post (WaPo) reporters. ..."